"Icaros Desktop is an effort to build a modern Amiga-compatible operating system for standard x86 hardware. It's a distribution built atop AROS, which is an open source effort to create a system compatible at the API level with the AmigaOS 3.x series. I recently had a chat to the creator of Icaros, Paolo Besser, about the creation of the OS and why Amiga continues to inspire people today."

Haters gonna hate... BTW AmigaOS 4 is not for everyone, but It's a really nice OS, It's fun to use, fun to develop for and It's really different to the bloated software that We're used to use.

Just a silly example but... I can run Quake 3, Quake 2 and Heretic using different resolutions at the same time and switch instantly between them in my 733mhz SAM with 512MB... I can't do anything similar in my 10 or 20 times more powerful Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM... OS X is slow even to switch between desktop spaces! (and Linux is the same or worse, dunno 'bout Windows pbly even worse than Linux)

AmigaOS gives us a lesson: modern hardware is ruined by layers and layers and layers of complexity and bloated software.

Haters gonna hate... BTW AmigaOS 4 is not for everyone, but It's a really nice OS, It's fun to use, fun to develop for and It's really different to the bloated software that We're used to use.

While I myself have never tried AmigaOS 4, even certain things on my A4000 with AmigaOS 3.9 and a Radeon 9250 just seem faster than doing things under Linux / Windows. One of those is using magic menu to right click and have all of the applications menus wherever I am on the screen. I agree that most operating systems (in this case I refer to Linux's Desktop Environments as separate operating systems i.e. KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, etc)

Just a silly example but... I can run Quake 3, Quake 2 and Heretic using different resolutions at the same time and switch instantly between them in my 733mhz SAM with 512MB... I can't do anything similar in my 10 or 20 times more powerful Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM... OS X is slow even to switch between desktop spaces! (and Linux is the same or worse, dunno 'bout Windows pbly even worse than Linux)

Actually under Gnome-shell and KDE, switching between workspaces is extremely fast, and frighteningly fast under E17 (which, even though it's not finished) reminds me a lot of the Amiga, and really is not bloated in the way a lot of DEs and OSs are.)

Windows doesn't even have workspaces, you have to use some third party add-ons, and they never work quite right.

AmigaOS gives us a lesson: modern hardware is ruined by layers and layers and layers of complexity and bloated software.

Agreed, agreed and agreed. Many times I tell people that the operating system should be solely written in Assembly, C, or C++. Can you imagine if the entire UI, kernel, and main applications were all written in assembly how sickeningly fast it would be?

Instead we get people writing things in Java, which has to be one of the worse offenders in making it far too easy to make bloated code.

My only complaint about AmigaOS 4 is the lack of available hardware to run it on, and due to that lack, it's extremely expensive. The only real way to 'bring Amiga back' is to release something like a Raspberry Pi / Beagle Board / Panda Board type setup that is cheap, but PPC / 68k compatible, then release AmigaOS4 on it.

Maybe those netbooks that are supposed to come out will help a lot though (I'll probably buy one if they are cheap enough)

Just a silly example but... I can run Quake 3, Quake 2 and Heretic using different resolutions at the same time and switch instantly between them in my 733mhz SAM with 512MB...

Wow, that's certainly a compelling use case. I find myself needing to do this every day.
You are running ancient games using very little video memory on a machine that probably have a ton of the thing compared to the era when these games were the state of the art.
It's well documented that video memory size increases at a much faster rate than the bandwidth between the system memory and the video memory.
If you could run modern games that use 512mb or more video memory on amiga os, switching between multiple instances of them would be as slow as on anything else because you'd have to reupload all that stuff to video memory just the same as any other os.

On the other hand nobody cares because running multiple games on the same machine is pointless.

I can't do anything similar in my 10 or 20 times more powerful Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM... OS X is slow even to switch between desktop spaces! (and Linux is the same or worse, dunno 'bout Windows pbly even worse than Linux)

Switching desktop spaces in linux is instanteous save from transition effects and it's very likely the same on macos, I have no idea what you're on about.

AmigaOS gives us a lesson: modern hardware is ruined by layers and layers and layers of complexity and bloated software.

No, the lesson is actually: "if you don't support any hardware or any modern feature that makes useful things possible, you end up with simpler and faster code". Who would have thought?

There's a reason hardly any serious work is being done on Amiga, and for a long time.

Even if MORB is a bit too harsh in this case, goes too far with criticism of AROS - at least AROS is sane in that it mostly knows its place, knows what it is, a nostalgic toy pet project.

I really doubt you ever had to seriously develop for AmigaOS, and not only because you'd be more likely cursing it instead of calling it fun* - what can you know about Amiga dev if you make such basic mistake like "AmigaOS is a [...] system without preemptive multitasking"?

* yeah, fun fight to have something barely enough for required function that doesn't nuke the OS while running... (ohh, but wasting time on that suddenly places you among the few leet coders)
Plus, such code is unmaintainable; you can see that in how progress ground almost to a halt.
...and then you wonder why people move to other platforms. It had millions of users, now there are estimated few thousand; a per mil left.

Amiga is just old and does very little. Win98 or 2k are also snappy - while being much ahead in software sophistication.

And yay, you can play few FPS games at the same time, how great that the OS and its GFX stack are optimised for such pointless usage...

...games which are ports from the PC; there is a very good reason for that / seriously, you're using a decade+ old PC software as examples of what Amiga can offer? Most of the new useful software are ports from the PC, just lagging behind and with pains of porting to a stable state.
Just cut the middle crap, you ARE making it into a PC anyway (also WRT hardware, just insisting on some non-standard CPU architecture for some reason)